Comments

Perhaps Marohasy has a further subtle point to convey in the graph Lambert reproduces? Why does the year scale show equally spaced hash marks labeled as decades from 1850 to 1910, then have the next three decades hashes labeled 1925, 1930, 1945, before resuming the conventional representation with 1950?

“That plot shows the trend since 1850 quite clearly, more so I’d say than a tight-axis plot.”

If you really think that the trend is more clear in Marohasy’s plot with the scale from 10deg to 15deg, instead of the tight axis plot from -0.8C to +0.6C, then I really can’t help you.

In the tight axis plot, you can see clearly that the temperature has risen by about 0.8degC over the 150 years, while in the broader axis plot you can see it as well, but you need to squint and use the grid lines to be sure.

A country where Cat Stevens gets booted out of the country because his new funny name sounds like some other guy’s funny name.

Cat Stevens aka Yusuf Islam was not kept out of the country (not “booted out”) because of his name. He was kept out because of his public endorsement of the death fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie, which correctly labeled him as an extreme Islamist. We’re trying to keep extreme Islamists out of the country. They’ve done a bit of damage here.

As far as Marohasy’s graph is concerned the scale is less important than the fact that the temperature has increased about one degree in 150 years.

Hardly a disastrous increase, especially considering that the time period before that is called the “little ice age”.

We’re talking about the mean global annual surface temperature. A 1 K change is enough to move agricultural growing belts and the edges of ice caps by hundreds of miles. In fact, an increase of 6 K would probably be enough to wipe out humanity, as at that point the oceans would begin emitting hydrogen sulfide.

“A 1 K change is enough to move agricultural growing belts and the edges of ice caps by hundreds of miles.”

Since there is evidence of such a temperature increase in the last 100 years where is the evidence that the agricultural zones of the world have moved “hundreds of miles” in the last century, I’d like to see it. The “ice caps” have certainly done no such thing.

I take your point on warming and water shortage being a potential cause for conflict. Seen the good piece in New Scientist claiming you can support a first world standard of living on 140 litres a day, providing you can import the heavy water consuming products. A water shortage is not mainly a rainfall issue, it is a use issue. The spectacular pictures of dried lakes is basically water being diverted.
In short international arbitration on shared resources like water is more likely to work than CO2 limites.

Food production could need to adapt, but that is not new.
Do a search on Green Revolution, or causes and treatment the 1930’s dust bowl.

Do a search on Green Revolution, or causes and treatment the 1930’s dust bowl.

The Green Revolution was a simple idea: apply lots of Nitrogen and subsidize electric pumps to utilize groundwater. Oh, and develop a few new varieties to avoid shattering.

That’s it. I have seen a new idea that uses less water for rice, but otherwise GR ideas aren’t going to work for too much longer in the future, as the by-products of the Green Revolution are dead zones and depleted fossil water. When the groundwater’s gone, then what?

Meanwhile in Australia, wheat and sheep farming in South Australia and Western Australia have shifted signficantly south with cattle or coarse graisn repalcin them but hey if it doesn’t happen in America and it doesn’t involve actual human beings (AKA Americans)it doesn;t really matter.

It was not rocket science: rather, it was a fairly logical application of the basic knowledge that most crops are nitrogen-limited, combined with the easy production of N-based fertiliser afforded by the expanded use of fossil fuels. The GR varieties developed to maximise the industrial fertilisers are the photosynthetic version of battery chickens, and essentially fall over if the high-energy fertiliser and pesticide inputs are removed.

And in the wake of GR industrial agriculture lies impoverished soil activity, or simply lost soil altogether, and depleted aquifers and over-allocated surface catchments. These are just several of the negative consequences of the industrial agriculture of the Green revolution, and the movement of temperature and hydrological envelopes will compound the damage.

Turning to GM as the new GR is likely to be an endeavour fraught with dashed hopes (if not fat profits for the GE companies) in most cases. My former biotech colleagues would blanch to hear me say it, but there ya go…

We are looking at a glass half full or half empty. The dust bowl started due to a change in land use (wheat) when rainfall was higher than usual. When rainfall dropped back, the soil dried out and blew away. FDRs response was more trees and changes in farming. Food production in the USA is higher now than in 1850.

GR, change in crop types leading to more food. The most famous big trick is shorter the crops can put resources into grain not storks. Result, less Indians hungry.

There were problems and mankind dealt with them best they could. Overall the temp went up 1C and mankind thrived.
Not only that but we barely noticed the warming. It certainly had less impact than the roll-out of electricity.
Conclusion, over then next 150 there are likely to be problems AND solutions.

Since there is evidence of such a temperature increase in the last 100 years where is the evidence that the agricultural zones of the world have moved “hundreds of miles” in the last century, I’d like to see it. The “ice caps” have certainly done no such thing.

Lance, assume a solar constant of 1,366 watts per square meter. Note that the Earth’s mean radius is 6,371,010 meters. Allow for nonradiative heat transfer between latitudes. Now plot temperature versus latitude for an Earth at Ts = 287 K and one at Ts = 288 K.

Note, too, that the answer will actually be smaller than the real one by a bit because the polar radius is smaller than the equatorial radius.

1. We aren’t talking about another 1 degree though because emissions are continuing to rise and also because there’s a lag between emissions and warming. (Roughly 90% of the additional energy is absorbed by the oceans and the oceans have HUGE thermal interia.

2. The only people arguing against finding solutions are denialists like Ben and Lance – see Ben’s comments in this very thread.

Basically every time someone ays “Hee, maybe we need to fidn a solution” they start screaming about the New World Order International Socialist Conspiracy. Heck, we have oen semi-regular here who has suggested in all seriousness that Al Gore may be the Anti-Christ.

Your link to arborday.org shows a map that morphs from the USDA 1990 hardiness zones to ones estimated by aborday.org. Last time I checked they are NOT the USDA nor are their calculations official or peer reviewed.

Also why don’t you ease up on the anti-fascist, xenophobic rhetoric a bit. It just gives your posts an air of lunatic fringe paranoia. I spend a good deal of my vacation time visiting my in-laws in Africa and my mother only recently became a US citizen. All my relatives on her side live in Reykjavik, Amsterdam, Copenhagen or Beijing. Get a clue.

Sean writes, “There were problems and mankind dealt with them best they could. Overall the temp went up 1C and mankind thrived”.

Sean, could you please inform me as to what your qualifications are in the life sciences – say, population ecology, zoology or biology? Based on your posts, its clear to me what your answer will be. I haven’t got time to counter all of your anthropocentric posts – I have done that many times before on Deltoid with other thinkers like you. Your arguments expunge the link between the natural economy and the state of human civilization. You write as if human are exempt from the laws of nature. Here’s the rub: humans depend on a wide array of provisioning ecological services that emerge over variable spatial and temporal scales from natural systems. These services are based on a stupendous number of interactions amongst the constitutent biota of natural systems – one of the most puzzling areas of ecology is connecting processes occuring at rhe level of individual organisms and emergent processes such as the productivity and resilience of natural systems. Why is this important? Because these systems generate conditions that permit humans to exist and persist. We have few technological substitutes for these services – indeed, if some crucial ones were to to disappear, then we’d be staring extinction in the face.

Why is this relevant? Because humans are simplifying and stressing nature on a scale that is unprecendented in 65 million years. Our species is paving, ploughing, damming, dredging, mining, overharvesting, biologically homogenising, eutrophicating, and slashing and burning the biosphere at an alarming rate. We are altering the chemical composition of the air and the water, leading to such outcomes as rapid climate change. The real question that is challenging the scientific community – myself incluided – is how far we can simplify nature before natural systems are unable to sustain life in a manner that we know. Nature is quite resilient – it has had to be to withstand the human assault thus far – but there is no guarantee that our current course can continue indefinitely.

So the argument that “There were problems and mankind dealt with them best they could” is misplaced. Our species does not have the technology to replicate most of the vital services – pollination, breakdown of terrestrial wastes, climate control, maintenance of soil fertility, seed dispersal, stabilisation of coastlines, pest control, nutrient cycling etc. – I alluded to earlier. One can therefore consider that we are conducting a single, non-replicatable experiment on systems of immense complexity whose functioning we barely understand but which sustain us. As Barton said earlier, a 6 C rise in global mean temperature over the coming century would almost mean certain extinction for humanity. The additional factor that is rarely discussed in this thread is that natural systems would collapse piecemeal under this kind of immense stress. Natural systems have not evolved to respond to anything quite on that scale. The working parts of nature’s machinery – genetically distinct populations and species that make up our planet’s biodiversity – would be hammered. The resulting mass extinction would have enormous ecological consequences that would rebound on civilization (and already are).

You may not understand the science that underpins my arguments, but that is no reason to dispense with it.

Sorry Lance, your rants about how the last few surviving White Europeans would soon be seeking shelter in the US from the inevitable rise of the demographic imperialism of the Mulsim hordes and the Sharia law tyranny which would unfailingly follow set a level for “lunatic fringe paranoia” I could never hope to match.

When you stop expressing Neofascist views, I’ll stop calling you a Neofascist.

Your link to arborday.org shows a map that morphs from the USDA 1990 hardiness zones to ones estimated by aborday.org. Last time I checked they are NOT the USDA nor are their calculations official or peer reviewed.

However, where the rubber meets the pavement lies in the fact that gardeners – professionals and amateurs alike – began noticing that warmer-climate plants were starting to thrive in areas where they had not a decade earlier. There’s so much data out there from so many sources that the effect of warming can’t be denied.

Further to dhog @ 124, my best title may be ‘green infrastructure guy’, across multiple disciplines, using applied research.

Let me tell you, we don’t give a f*ck about small-minded ill-informed people wondering whether a map is peer-reviewed. Why? Because the map reflects the situation on the ground for gardeners. They are the audience. And gardeners know that green-up begins earlier and hardiness zones are moving north.

Gardeners are natural anti-denialists, because they see the situation on the ground, every day.

Pathetic denialists needing to maintain self-identities have nothing. Nothing. And because pathetic denialists are being left behind by society, their pathetic reflexive defensive replies are getting more and more comical.

2.

I appreciate the record Jeff Harvey is leaving behind. One day, perhaps, historians will look back at what happened at this time and find the impassioned pleas that fell on deaf ears and wonder why, piece together evidence, and tell the story of the societal failure of this time. I’m sure Harvey’s words will appear somewhere in this sort of future work.

That said, and again being appreciative of the impassioned assertion, these sorts of willful ignorami and stubborn self-regarders are going to get left behind. It should be by stubborn obstinacy and refusal to remove head from *ss sand, and not by our stubborn refusal to welcome the occasional seer-of-light who wishes to catch up to society.

In the meantime, we are wearing out a lot of hammers continuing to whack-a-mole instead of using these hammers to build stuff to adapt and mitigate. They will never believe anything any of us says. Who cares, really, whether or not they come around? Let them get left behind. I personally don’t care whether denialists get left behind. Serves ’em right. Cruel? They had their chance and didn’t want to take it.

3.

Lastly, to Bernard J’s excellent @ 116:

And in the wake of GR industrial agriculture lies impoverished soil activity, or simply lost soil altogether, and depleted aquifers and over-allocated surface catchments. These are just several of the negative consequences of the industrial agriculture of the Green revolution, and the movement of temperature and hydrological envelopes will compound the damage.

Several years ago industrial ag tried a campaign to state that organic ag had runoff, poop, lower yields, and all kinds of reeeeeally bad things associated with it. This was not long after the slow realization by some of the public that industrial ag ruins the soil and the deep American Midwest soil was going away. Yet another campaign of smear and fear by the vested interests.

“#123Sorry Lance, your rants about how the last few surviving White Europeans would soon be seeking shelter in the US from the inevitable rise of the demographic imperialism of the Mulsim hordes and the Sharia law tyranny which would unfailingly follow set a level for “lunatic fringe paranoia” I could never hope to match.
”

Earth to Ian Gould! Please show where I have ever said anything even remotely close to this insanity.

It was on the same “Dispatches fron the cultyure wars” thread as your exposition on why Canda was inferuior ot the US beause it hadv a smaller military and you disswertation on how the dirty Euros thoguht they were so much btter than the US because they had no idea hwo diffcult it was to maintain even basic standards of vicilisation in a country like the US plagued by an excess of “minorities”.

Anyone who has ever tried to use the search function on Scienceblogs will no how difficult it is to be more specific trhan that.

The thread started with a graph on the last 150 years. Either 1C was a big deal or it was not. If the Netherlands had slipped under the waves we would not be arguing about scales on graphs.

World life expectancies up from 31 years in 1900 to 65 years now – source WHO. World population rose from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 6 billion in 2000. And all this in the face of several major world-wide plagues, and a couple of large wars.

Jeff Harvey suspects f I have no life sciences qualifications. He is right, I do not. I work for a train company: – electric trains so no connection to big oil industry. I do have a question for you life science specialist – does anyone have any measure by which we as a species are not thriving compared to 150 years ago. Note, I am not asking about soils or other species or the environment. Just us humans. As a species, have we thrived in spite of the 1C rise in the graph? I will be googling answers to checking the same criteria has been applied to at least one other species.

Of course those of you who wonder if the 1C was real or within natural limits are probably less surprised it is so hard to find a dramatic negative impact on the species.

Hey, I’ve had worse stuff written here about myself by our fine friends than what Lance wrote about Ian, and those posts were never disemvowled. I’m being unfairly discriminated against because of my race. I want reparations!

“I do have a question for you life science specialist [sic] – does anyone have any measure by which we as a species are not thriving compared to 150 years ago.”

Further to dhogaza’s insight about limited resources (both biological and non-biological), the ebullient growth of human society was borne on the back of tens (if not hundreds) of millions of years of collected and concentrated photosynthetic activity.

We’re coming up to being about half-way through this non-renewable energy resource, and there is no way that the unprecedented growth of human numbers and lifestyle will continue for too many more decades as it has since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

Climate change or not.

Oh, and about 80% of the world’s human population might be scratching their heads about the way that they are ‘thriving’ compared with us…

The other thing that your noneducation in life sciences has left you bereft of, is the understanding that a 1.0-1.5ºC warming, whist seeming to be a minor issue for the super-adaptable Homo sapiens, has much more profound impact on the bioclimatic envelopes and phenological rhythms of the bulk of the biosphere. And boy, do we depend on the services of the biosphere. Jeff harvey has already explained the importance of these to you at #122:

[H]umans depend on a wide array of provisioning ecological services that emerge over variable spatial and temporal scales from natural systems. These services are based on a stupendous number of interactions amongst the constitutent biota of natural systems – one of the most puzzling areas of ecology is connecting processes occuring at rhe level of individual organisms and emergent processes such as the productivity and resilience of natural systems. Why is this important? Because these systems generate conditions that permit humans to exist and persist. We have few technological substitutes for these services – indeed, if some crucial ones were to to disappear, then we’d be staring extinction in the face.

If you cannot understand the profound implications of this incontrovertible truth, or if you do not have the wherewithall to take Jeff’s information and learn to confirm it for yourself, you really shouldn’t be leaping forward into the assumption that because yesterday was fine for Mr and Mrs Western Human, tomorrow will be too.

You’re simply floundering around with blickers over your eyes – but then, that pretty much describes most of the commentary coming from the Denialosphere…

This is of course the point where you scream “Malthus! Club of Rome! Ehrlich and Ehrlich! Poodles! Spawn of Lucifer!”

The response is straightforward: the train might not pull into the station bang on time, but it’s going to pull into the station nevertheless. Those of us with our ears to the tracks can hear it coming.

Exactly what its cargo will be is hard to accurately predict, but its certain to include more than a few nasty surprises.

To touch upon dhogaza’s example again, I’ve grown thousands of bacterial and mammalian cell lines in petri dishes and culture-flasks over the years, and there’s no way to avoid what happens if the resources required for continued growth run out.

If you have some remarkable insight about this that the rest of us are oblivious to, please do share.

Old blog readers will known the two standard ways to not answer the question are to say, you are not an expert and you have taken the devils gold.
I am not pro or anti fertiliser, but the green revolution does not resume as just more fertiliser. 5 minutes on the Internet can verify it. So I was more amused than stressed about the life science remark. The point I made was history /geography/ geopolitical not life science. If the world did get warmer, we as a species did not pay a heavy price.

Around 1850, the population of Ireland crashed. Maybe for cultural reasons we Anglo-Irish have taken a particular interest in the potato famine and after. But almost all us did history in school. Did you have to talk to old folks to collect aural history? Did the old folks give you the impression life in general is harder now or easier? Is the major part of temp rise in the graph in period covered by this aural history? Much of it even covered by TV reporting.

I note Jeff claims we are bad for the other species and that this will bite us in the a.. Clearly if we thrive, other species pay the price. Put simply, more people and cheap food means less wildlife. Intensive farming is bad for bio diversity. However, in the 150 year period in question we have largely got away with it. In fact in England there is barely an area left in its native state, and there has not been for hundreds of years. The forests are long gone. Of course if we cut meat consumption, we could take land out of production to put it back. Again a more targeted action than CO2 tax. Give the weight problem we have in the western world it would have other benefits. Of course eating Bio could help a little, but you need the income to pay for it. So manufacturing more cars to pay for expensive happy chickens may not be Eco friendly – remember bio fuel.

Bernard, you did see the point was comparing the world 1850 to the world 2008 using recognised data sources, not the third world to the first world. I agree Romanians have every reason to want air conditioning and PVC doors, and I hope they sell enough Logans to allow it.

Dano, I take your point that we wreck whole ecosystems. But most people’s priority is us. We are not really fussed unless it is photogenic, intelligent or cuddly. We like our nature tamed, and preferably somewhere we can drive the kids too for a day out. Save the whales but forget the plankton.

Dano, I take your point that we wreck whole ecosystems. But most people’s priority is us. We are not really fussed unless it is photogenic, intelligent or cuddly. We like our nature tamed, and preferably somewhere we can drive the kids too

Well then! That settles it! Ecosystems and us wi’ll be OK, because we’re not fussed about it.

Whew! What a relief.

the green revolution does not resume as just more fertiliser. 5 minutes on the Internet can verify it.

Did you hit the ‘wisdom’ button on The Google? No? No one above said the GR was more fert only. As I said above: the GR was: apply more fert., expand irrigation, develop some new crop varieties. In some places where people could afford it and the gummint subsidized it (where it could afford it), pesticides were used.

If it was something else major, do share so we can call the publishers of our textbooks we kept when we studied this in Uni.

Dano,
We seem to have moved to agreement now you have mentioned roll of government initiatives. Not primarily life science. Politics. In this case as in the context of the Cold War – geopolitics. I might have missed that if I was a life sciencist.